Theoretical Criminology
http://tcr.sagepub.com/
Preparing for prison? : The criminalization of school discipline in the USA
Paul J. Hirschfield
Theoretical Criminology 2008 12: 79
DOI: 10.1177/1362480607085795
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/12/1/79
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
Additional services and information for Theoretical Criminology can be found at:
Email Alerts: http://tcr.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts
Subscriptions: http://tcr.sagepub.com/subscriptions
Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav
Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Citations: http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/12/1/79.refs.html
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Theoretical Criminology
© 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London,
New Delhi and Singapore.
www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 12(1): 79–101; 1362–4806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480607085795
Preparing for prison?
The criminalization of school discipline in the USA
PA U L J . H I R S C H F I E L D
Rutgers University, USA
Abstract
American schools increasingly define and manage the problem of
student discipline through a prism of crime control. Most theoretical
explanations fail to situate school criminalization in a broader
structural context, to fully explain its spatio-temporal variations, and
to specify the processes and subjectivities that mediate between
structural and legal forces and the behavior of school actors. A
multilevel structural model of school criminalization is developed
which posits that a troubled domestic economy, the mass
unemployment and incarceration of disadvantaged minorities, and
resulting fiscal crises in urban public education have shifted school
disciplinary policies and practices and staff perceptions of poor
students of color in a manner that promotes greater punishment and
exclusion of students perceived to be on a criminal justice ‘track’.
Key Words
criminalization • school discipline • school security • social exclusion
• urban education
That school was run more like a prison than a high school. It don’t have to be nothing illegal about it. But you’re getting arrested. No regard for if a college going to
accept you with this record. No regard for none of that, because you’re not
expected to leave this school and go to college. You’re not expected to do anything.
(JW—Former inner-city high school student,
current maximum security prisoner1)
Order and discipline have always been an animus of American public
schools, especially those serving the children of the working class and the
79
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
80
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
poor. Even comparisons of urban schools and prisons have become well
established—even commonplace (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Foucault, 1977;
Parenti, 2000; Staples, 2000; Wacquant, 2001; Giroux, 2003; Fine et al.,
2004). The emphasis on the orderly movement of students and their obedience to strict codes of conduct is important both to schools’ operational
functioning and to their societal functions. Critical scholars have argued
that strict disciplinary regimens in working class schools help to promote
smooth and voluntary transitions into an industrial workplace that tightly
regulates and subordinates laborers (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Foucault,
1977). Commentators like Horace Mann and Emile Durkheim, both of
whom saw mass education as the cornerstone of a cohesive, inclusive, and
democratic society, also valued discipline for instilling moral and civic
virtues (Durkheim, 1973; Bowles and Gintis, 1976).
Whether viewed as democratization or domination, the traditional disciplinary project of American mass education is slowly crumbling. The industrial economy and civil society have weakened considerably in recent
decades, especially in cities. At the same time, the criminal justice system
has ballooned in size and influence. These changes weakened the structural
and ideological foundations of school disciplinary practice. The management of student deviance, divested of its broader social aims, is prone to
redefinition and reappropriation for other ends. Especially in schools that
face very real problems of gangs and violence (Devine, 1996), rule-breaking
and trouble-making students are more likely to be defined as criminals—
symbolically, if not legally—and treated as such in policy and practice. In
short, the problems that once invoked the idea and apparatus of student
discipline have increasingly become criminalized.
Studies of criminalization have a rich history (Jenness, 2004), so it is
important to clarify and justify this article’s usage of the term. Whereas the
concept usually connotes the social and political process that culminates in
behaviors like abortion or stalking becoming criminalized, only a small portion of the criminalization of school discipline fits this definition. Most legislative responses to school deviance do not codify new crimes or escalate
penalties. Rather, legal reforms mandate that certain behaviors—already
illegal—such as drug and weapons possession are referred to the police when
they occur on school property. Other policies stipulate that students are
treated like actual or suspected criminals, for instance by subjecting them to
in-school suspension or scrutiny by armed police, dogs, or metal detectors.
Criminalization is conceived here even more broadly as the shift toward
a crime control paradigm in the definition and management of the problem of student deviance. Criminalization encompasses the manner in
which policy makers and school actors think and communicate about the
problem of student rule-violation as well as myriad dimensions of school
praxis including architecture, penal procedure, and security technologies
and tactics. In Governing through Crime, Jonathan Simon (2006) analyzes
the parameters of a crime control paradigm in the realm of school governance and elsewhere. He extends the concept of criminalization into the
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
symbolic realm, arguing that non-crime problems such as school failure
can become criminalized in political contexts through the use of crime
metaphors in framing the problem and through embracing solutions that
share the structure and logic of crime control.
I focus here on the most visible, clear-cut, and quantifiable manifestations of school criminalization in order to address the etiology of criminalization rather than its conceptualization and to lay the groundwork for
empirical tests of my theoretical propositions. However, even my proposed
‘hard’ indicators of criminalization are not necessarily or universally experienced as criminalization. Schools’ practices, including the meting out of
punishment and the provision of security, are widely variable both between
and within jurisdictions. This corresponds to variation in state and local
political conditions and to the unique professional and behavioral milieu of
each semi-autonomous school (Bryk et al., 1998). Still, an overall trend in
school criminalization has accelerated since the early 1990s across the
socio-economic and geographic spectrum. This article critiques extant
accounts of school criminalization and introduces a new multilevel theoretical model that integrates structural and cultural approaches. Weaving
together insights from extant theories, this account explains key patterns of
divergence, as well as convergence.
The divergence pattern most fundamental and worthy of explanation is
that criminalization is more prevalent and intense in schools that are heavily populated by disadvantaged urban minorities (Wacquant, 2001). The
theory developed herein, which accounts for temporal, spatial, and demographic concentrations in criminalization, posits that schools’ altered disciplinary and security regimes can be traced largely to deindustrialization,
which shifted impacted schools and their disciplinary practices from productive ends toward a warehousing function, and the ensuing massive criminal justice expansion that deprived schools of potential resources. Aided by
a crime-fixated and punitive political climate, these changes helped reorient
school actors more toward the prevention and punishment of crime, and
less toward the preparation of workers and citizens. The present account,
unlike its predecessors, specifies the intermediary processes linking political-economic shifts to school practices, as well as subjective interpretations
and other forces that condition these processes.
Three dimensions of school criminalization
From the complex and variegated phenomena of school criminalization, I
distill three distinct yet interlocking dimensions. To understand why schools
have come to look, sound, and act more like criminal justice institutions, it
is necessary to examine each of these developments. The first major trend is
that school punishment has become more formal and actuarial. Mirroring
developments in juvenile justice (Feld, 1999), school punishment is increasingly based on uniform procedural and disciplinary guidelines evolving
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
81
82
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
around the nature of the offense rather than the discretion of teachers and
other traditional disciplinary agents. This trend is most recognizable in the
set of policies and practices dubbed ‘zero tolerance’. Zero tolerance policies
spread rapidly in the early 1990s in the midst of rising rates of school victimization and juvenile violence overall (Toby, 1998; Burns and Crawford,
1999). They were nationalized in 1994 with the passage of the Gun-Free
Schools Act. Mandated to adopt zero tolerance for weapons, a large majority of school districts soon adopted ‘zero tolerance’ policies for alcohol,
tobacco, drugs and violence (Simon, 2006). These policies resemble the
determinate sentencing schemes that prevail in most states. But unlike
mandatory criminal sentences, zero tolerance policies typically permit little
consideration of mitigating circumstances (Schwartz and Rieser, 2001).
The transfer of disciplinary discretion from teachers and school authorities to disciplinary codes that stipulate exclusionary punishments has contributed to a second trend of more frequent suspensions and expulsions.2
Expanded school exclusion is a symbolic form of criminalization, irrespective of whether it follows strict penal guidelines or the whims of authorities.
Education agencies that increase their use of exclusionary punishments
endorse the prevailing rationale of contemporary criminal justice practice—
deterrence and incapacitation (Garland, 2001).3
Reflecting patterns in the criminal justice system, the intensification of
school punishment is borne disproportionately by youth of color. Studies
consistently document that minority students are more often subject to suspensions and expulsions and that these disparities do not closely reflect
behavioral differences (Brooks et al., 1999; Skiba et al., 2002). Furthermore,
suspensions for offenses that are not subject to automatic penalties, like
disorder and insubordination, also appear to have increased, especially for
disadvantaged minorities (Civil Rights Project, 2000).4
Declining teacher discretion and increased harshness in both defining and
punishing school deviance can be properly understood only in relation to a
third set of practices, namely, the importation of criminal justice into schools.
This form of criminalization includes increased use of criminal justice technology, methodology, and personnel for disciplinary and security purposes. ‘Zero
tolerance’ exemplifies this trend too, but it is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Criminal justice tools and personnel play an increasingly important role
at nearly every stage of the disciplinary process. While police and security
officers in schools are hardly novel, school policing is the fastest growing
law enforcement field.5 A 2004 national survey of teachers reports that 67
percent of teachers in majority-black or Hispanic middle and high schools
report armed police stationed in their schools (Public Agenda, 2004).
Suburban schools, where 60 percent of teachers work alongside armed
police, are not far behind, however (Public Agenda, 2004).
Generally accompanying police and security guards are law enforcement
methods like bag searches and video cameras. Among preventive practices,
metal detectors and personal searches seem the clearest indications of criminalization since they define students as criminal suspects. Not surprisingly,
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
the likelihood of metal detectors is positively related to the prevalence of
minority students (DeVoe et al., 2005). Urban schools feature more gates,
walls and barricades as well (Gottfredson et al., 2000). On the other hand,
drug sniffing dogs are more commonplace in suburban, rural, and predominantly white schools (DeVoe et al., 2005).
To properly portray the extent and distribution of criminalization, one
must dig deeper than national prevalence patterns. A reasonable proposition induced from journalistic and ethnographic accounts is that large,
hyper-segregated school districts like New York City (NYC) and Chicago,
which have placed city or school district police departments in charge of
school security, are the most criminalized. NYC’s school police force is
larger than the entire Boston Police Department (Devine, 1996). School
resource officers (SROs) in these schools receive training specific to educational settings. However, as on the street, any violations of the law are subject to arrest, and school officers are not required to obtain permission from
anyone to make an arrest (Devine, 1996; Hagan et al., 2002). Ethnographic
research suggests that an influx of law enforcement erodes the traditional
disciplinary role of teachers and other school authorities (Brotherton, 1996;
Devine, 1996). In Miami-Dade, Florida, school arrests increased from 820
in 1999 to 2435 in 2001, and offenses that were once handled mostly
internally—simple assaults and ‘miscellaneous offenses’—comprised a staggering 57 percent (Fuentes, 2003).
The criminalization of school discipline extends into the juvenile court.
Data from several jurisdictions including Toledo, Ohio, Miami-Dade
(Rimer, 2004), and Katy, Texas (Graves, 2004), on the type of offenses that
schools refer to the juvenile court show that the alleged misconduct leading
to court referral is typically quite minor. This ‘net-widening’ effect reflects
increased collaboration between schools and the juvenile justice system,
which has eroded the traditional boundaries between the two institutions.
As of 2000, 41 states mandated law enforcement referral for school crimes
including drugs, violence, and weapons violations (Civil Rights Project,
2000). According to a recent news investigation, ‘In Ohio, Virginia,
Kentucky and Florida, juvenile court judges are complaining that their
courtrooms are at risk of being overwhelmed by student misconduct cases
that should be handled in the schools’ (Rimer, 2004: A1). In addition, information-sharing agreements between education and justice agencies set the
stage for laws that permit schools across diverse jurisdictions to expel students for outside legal entanglements (Bickerstaff et al., 1997; Spielman and
Rossi, 1997; Brooks et al., 1999).
Although such hard indicators illustrate and quantify the problem of criminalization, they fail to convey its fluidity and complexity. Unidimensional
descriptions tend to overstate the convergence in criminalization across contexts. It is true that some middle class suburban and rural schools have also
instituted metal detectors and school police, along with tools at the less coercive end of the carceral continuum like video cameras (Kupchik and
Monahan, 2006). However, homology of form does not dictate uniformity in
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
83
84
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
substance, etiology, or function. While suburban schools are hardly immune
from criminalization, criminalization in these contexts takes on more diluted
or hybridized forms owing to the primacy of competing ideals like consumer
choice and individual freedom (Casella, 2003). Casella (2003) views suburban schools’ widespread adoption of security technologies as the result of
concerted efforts on the part of private security companies to cash in on the
fears of drugs and violence among educators and parents. Both the marketing of
these products as well as their manner of implementation, however, are tailored
to an audience that is wary of the prospect of criminalizing valued students.
Surveillance technologies are most appealing to this audience if they embrace the logic
and aesthetic of consumer freedom and individual productivity (i.e. self-discipline).6
At the same time, for reasons described in the next section, the imperatives of criminalization do weigh on suburban schools. These imperatives
are often difficult to reconcile with the image and prevailing ethos of many
of these schools. This distinction between the criminal justice mode of control and the softer, surveillance approaches embraced by the middle class is
aptly described by Staples (2000). While contemporary criminal justice control is, for the most part, externally imposed, physically coercive, and exclusionary, post-modern ‘everyday surveillance’—the logical culmination of
the disciplinary power described by Foucault (1977)—is productive, relatively democratic, and inclusive (Staples, 2000). According to Staples, the
latter forms of school control embody middle class parents’ and education
professionals’ desires for greater order, efficiency, and predictability in an
increasingly complex, scary, and fragmented social world.
Thus, school disciplinary and security planners in towns and suburbs, more
so than in the inner-city, must pursue technologies and practices that are flexible enough to fit contradictory aims and discourses. Video cameras offer this
flexibility, since they, on the one hand, expand disciplinary power through
providing knowledge of students and promoting self-monitoring and, on the
other hand, unobtrusively help to deter, detect, and prosecute potential
crimes. In a similar fashion, I posit that SROs in these schools give more
weight to their education and counseling functions and reserve coercive law
enforcement methods for students identified as threats or trouble-makers.
Metal detectors, in contrast, are less ambiguous and flexible in their purpose
and symbolic associations. Accordingly, whereas a recent mass walkout
among students in a NYC public school was unsuccessful in ending their use
(Santos, 2005), these devices spark more effective and united resistance from
students, parents, and educators in suburban schools, leading metal detectors
to go unsold or unused (Cantor et al., 2002).
Thus, criminalization in middle class schools is less intense and more
fluid than in the inner-city, where proximate or immediate crime threats are
overriding concerns. Suburban security reforms are more likely to complement existing school disciplinary approaches rather than displace them
(DeMitchell and Cobb, 2003). In short, the gated community may be a
more apt metaphor to describe the security transformation of affluent
schools, while the prison metaphor better suits that of inner-city schools.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
Four extant interpretations of school criminalization
Voluminous material has addressed the racial inequities and other harms associated with the criminalization of school security and discipline (Devine, 1996;
Brooks et al., 1999; Beger, 2002), but detailed theoretical explanation of this
multidimensional phenomenon is scarce (but see kupchik and Monahan,
2006). This is surprising, given how vast are the separate literatures linking
punitive criminal justice reforms and all key features of schooling, respectively,
to the cultural, political, and economic order (Bowles and Gintis, 1976;
Bourdieu and Passeron, 1977; Willis, 1977; Parenti, 2000; Garland, 2001). By
contrast, etiological discussion with respect to criminalization in the school
sphere, as summarized below, tends to eschew deeper, structural underpinnings in favor of proximate influences within the socio-political milieu.
Most commonly, this discussion evokes the language and imagery of the
‘moral panic’ (Cohen, 1972), portraying the hardening of school discipline
and security as a response to the upsurge of school crime and juvenile violence beginning in the late 1980s and several school ‘rampages’ in the 1990s
(Brooks et al., 1999; Beger, 2002; DeMitchell and Cobb, 2003; Rimer,
2004). According to this perspective, jarring media constructions of the ‘crisis’ of school violence unite the public, stakeholders (e.g. teachers’ unions),
and public officials in a stance of righteous indignation toward a marginalized ‘folk-devil’ (Burns and Crawford, 1999). Often emerging from this
emotional and political mobilization are quick-fix, punitive solutions (e.g.
zero tolerance, metal detectors) that are disproportionate to actual threats
of violence. Consistent with the moral panic perspective, school criminalization escalated throughout the USA in the 1990s, even though most
schools reported no serious crimes, urban schools experienced no ‘rampage’
shootings, and overall rates of school violence dropped steadily from 1993
through 2000 (Brooks et al., 1999; Devoe et al., 2005: 11, Figure 2.1).
The moral panic framework suggests when a rigorous political response
to an issue is required, but does not dictate a specific course of reform.
Public and media outcries over school violence do not always result in a
universal clamor for tighter security and more punishment, as evidenced by
the school violence panic in the 1970s (Toby, 1998). At the same time, this
framework does not explain why schools often maintain or intensify their
punitive efforts long after public panics over school violence subside.
Episodic moral panics help explain the initiation of criminalization but its
institutionalization rests on political, organizational, and structural forces
that fall outside of the scope of the theory.
A second account, which partially explains the sustainability of panicinspired reforms, focuses not on the political management of periodic moral
crises, but instead on the management of the neo-liberal push for school
accountability. In brief, the school accountability narrative suggests that
teachers and principals from financially strapped schools can meet externally imposed demands to boost standardized test scores and attendance
rates by excluding low-achievers and truants (Bryk et al., 1998; Fuentes,
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
85
86
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
2003)—an outcome promoted by selective or frequent application of the
exclusionary practices described thus far (Bowditch, 1993).7
The school accountability narrative is consistent with the spatio-temporal
and demographic distribution of criminalization. However, it is inconsistent
with the character of some reforms like zero tolerance. Criminalization for
the purpose of excluding particular underperforming or disruptive students
is best accomplished by strengthening school authorities’ discretion rather
than by transferring it to rigid guidelines and security agents that take little
account of academic standing. It is certainly the case that zero tolerance and
school police facilitate the exclusion of students accused of committing
offenses, but the apparent willingness to sacrifice some promising students
in the process begs explanation (Fuentes, 2003).
Both the moral panic and school accountability narratives give insufficient attention to the wider social, legal, cultural, political, and economic
contexts that frame schools’ responses to moral panics about youth and to
school accountability reforms. With respect to the legal context of disciplinary reform, sociologists offer a third, due process narrative. Toby (1998)
and Arum (2003) both argue that a student rights movement occurred in
the school disciplinary arena from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s as
judicial rulings increasingly sought to curb the arbitrary application of
exclusionary school punishments and press for greater codification and
standardization of disciplinary procedures. Both authors argue that these
court rulings undermined the traditional moral authority of school authorities, and schools became more restrained in imposing exclusionary punishments (Arum, 2003). They further assert that these rulings emboldened
students to openly defy teacher authority. Increasingly fearful of either
being attacked or sued by their students and eager to focus on teaching
instead of behavior management, teachers generally desired clearer delineations of their disciplinary responsibilities, along with the delegation of
some frontline responsibilities to other personnel. School principals, who
levy exclusionary sanctions, were also wary of litigation. Accordingly,
teachers unions and associations (e.g. American Federation of Teachers)
and national school principals associations are the major stakeholder
groups behind zero tolerance policies (Boylan et al., 2002). The due process
narrative also helps explain the expanded role of police and the juvenile
court in school discipline, since limiting the involvement of school professionals in the process reduces their vulnerability to litigation. The reason
why zero tolerance policies and SROs did not proliferate sooner may be
that dual crises in school violence and school funding were necessary to garner the necessary political support for these initiatives.
Whereas the due process narrative illuminates the legal circumstances that
hastened the formalization of school punishment, it fails to explain why
harsh disciplinary codes and an armed law enforcement presence are especially pronounced in inner-city schools. Arum notes that, ‘unlike middle
class whites’ many African-American and other non-white students and their
families ‘are not in a position to sustain serious legal challenges or pursue
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
legal remedies related to the application of school disciplinary procedures
without significant institutional support’ (2003: 210). At the same time,
judicial rulings since the 1980s—in keeping with ‘get tough’ sensibilities—
have largely upheld harsh, exclusionary punishments in the sole interest of
school safety (as long as no violations of due process are evident) (Arum,
2003). If concerns over liability are the primary impetus for the criminalization of school discipline, then one would wrongly predict greater criminalization in affluent suburban schools.
A fourth causal narrative, the ‘governing-through-crime’ thesis (Simon,
2006) also does not focus on the unique penal dynamics of inner-city schools.
The proper backdrop of this meta-narrative, mapped extensively by David
Garland (2001), features the decline of the industrial economy, the neo-liberal
and conservative attacks on the social welfare apparatus and other ‘nonmarket’ institutions including public schools, the turbulent racial politics and
rising youth crime beginning in the 1960s, and the decline of the rehabilitative
ideal. Within this altered economic, cultural, and political context, Simon
argues, fewer governmental entities pursue legitimacy through quality goods
and services or through redistributive claims. Beginning with the Omnibus
Crime Control Act of 1968, Simon traces the ascendancy of a new model of
governance centered on the control and punishment of crime. In the school
context, this mode of governance recasts disruptive students and failing
schools as criminals, treats other students and their parents as potential victims, and elevates centralized education policy makers to the roles of prosecutor and judge. These role realignments temper and narrow both the obligations
of government and the rights of citizenship with respect to education. Through
instituting market competition, performance monitoring, and accountability,
federal education reforms like the Safe and Drug Free Schools and
Communities Act (SDFSCA) and No Child Left Behind, analogous to the criminal law itself (Reiman, 1979), place the onus of responsibility for school crime
and the ‘crime’ of illiteracy on the underperforming students, teachers and
schools, while exonerating the political and economic system and its leaders.
Simon views federally sponsored or mandated responses to student misconduct such as zero tolerance, school police, metal detectors, and mandatory law
enforcement referrals as instrumental to the shift toward a ‘crime’ model of
school governance. At a rhetorical level, they aid in the attempt to imagine various school actors in the roles of criminal, victim, and law enforcers. At a political level, focusing on the crime issue is a safe and effective strategy for
politicians vying for the moral high ground, as epitomized by Nixon in 1968
and Rudolph Giuliani and Clinton during the 1990s (Beckett, 1997). Finally,
at a practical level, such reforms provide the ‘techniques of knowledge and
power’ that form the actual apparatus of crime governance. They are the
means through which schools are expected to document and manage their
crime problem, or risk harsh judgment and sanctions.
The governing through crime meta-narrative provides a cogent account
of governance at the upper-levels of school policy making, where criminalization initiatives often originate. However, a full explanatory account of
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
87
88
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
criminalization must further scrutinize the consent and complicity of the
governed. At the school level, criminalization is not merely accommodation
to an altered set of government constraints, mandates, and incentives.
Isomorphic institutional changes in schools also follow the diffusion of professional and broader cultural norms and related changes in the perceived
needs, behaviors, and circumstances of their students (DiMaggio and Powell,
1983). Federal laws like SDFSCA afford states and localities considerable
leeway in defining their own needs, goals, and objectives, leaving such issues
as metal detectors, drug sweeps, specific zero tolerance provisions, and
most other program-specific regulations up to local discretion. Compliance
with key SDFSCA provisions is reportedly partial and haphazard within
and across schools, and favored activities often stray from a crime control
paradigm (e.g. counseling and recreation) (Gottfredson et al., 2000).
Collectively, the preceding accounts lend multiple layers and dimensions
to our understanding of penal intensification within American schools. The
remainder of this article adds some pieces to the theoretical puzzle. While
integrating viable elements of all four narratives, I make two additional contributions. First, I affix these elements more securely onto the structural configurations of present-day America including the post-industrial economy
and the expanded penal system. Second, whereas the extant interpretations
imply that all schools or broad categories of schools sway in unison to prevailing political winds, the narrative developed here recognizes the limited
agency that school actors possess in defining and pursuing ends and means
other than those dictated by overseeing and regulating entities (Willis, 1977).
One fundamental and enduring goal that school actors pursue, through
diverse means and with variable success, whose critical relevance to school
disciplinary reform has not been adequately theorized—until now—is the
preparation and sorting of youth for future positions in the occupational and
social order.
The role of ‘objective’ structural conditions
The natural starting point for a narrative predicated on the interdependence
between schools and the larger social order is an analysis of politicaleconomic conditions. Various observers have described an economic
contraction in the late 1960s that seriously threatened corporate profit margins by the 1970s (Parenti, 2000; Garland, 2001). In response, corporations
reduced labor costs and increased profits through shifting industrial production offshore, automation, and mergers. The corresponding political
agenda included deregulation and an ideological and policy assault on
social welfare and worker protections. Public schools, which have provided
a periodic locus for struggles for full citizenship and equal opportunity and
a vision of the public good that counters the hegemony of the market
(Katznelson and Weir, 1985), did not escape the conservative and neoliberal offensive (Nolan and Anyon, 2004).
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
While the adverse consequences of these responses to the economic
downturn trickled down through the social class structure, school criminalization is particularly bound up with the fate of two impacted groups.
First, the accelerated deindustrialization in the USA’s core urban manufacturing centers, coupled with the mass exodus of the middle classes and their
property tax dollars to the suburbs, resulted in concentrations of unskilled
inner-city minorities with little access to legitimate work—except in the
expanding low-wage sectors (Wilson, 1996) and the military—as well as to
opportunities afforded by an equitably funded public education.
While deindustrialization deprives overwhelming numbers of inner-city
minorities of a productive role in the USA’s economy and perpetuates cycles
of drugs and violence, predominantly white cities and towns are also beset
by huge job losses in industry, mining, and agriculture (Duncan, 2000). In
earlier eras, the plight of these groups may have ushered in a second ‘New
Deal’ or ‘War on Poverty’ including massive government outlays to rebuild
the nation’s infrastructure and train disadvantaged populations for the
increasingly high-tech, flexible, global economy. But for reasons detailed
elsewhere (Beckett, 1997; Simon, 2006), elected officials saw more advantage in fixating on urban crime and drug ‘epidemics’ and building a stable
infrastructure around the control of crime.
While the rise of the ‘criminal justice-industrial complex’ may be, in large
part, the long-term, unintended consequence of short-sighted ‘get tough’
campaigns, its staying power derives from its role in the post-industrial
political economy. Penal expansion helped the State manage both rural and
urban economic crises. With respect to urban economic devastation, a campaign of arrest and incapacitation of an unprecedented pace and scope kept
a lid on unrest and opened the door to strategic urban redevelopment
within designated ‘safe zones’ (Parenti, 2000).
The prison-industrial complex also curbed the decline of many white rural
areas and, more broadly, pacified the white working class. Criminal justice
expansion artificially tightens the labor market (Western and Beckett, 1999),
stimulates the economy of ailing rural communities (Huling, 2002), and
affords rural residents greater electoral representation and populationbased federal appropriations (Huling, 2002). Accordingly, many rural
politicians stake their political careers on the location of juvenile and adult
prisons in their districts and the hundreds of stable, well-paying jobs that
they promise to generate for their constituents.8
The twin developments of deindustrialization and mass incarceration,
through shifting the political calculus of school policy decisions, have
important direct implications for state-level education policy. The same
state legislators with vested interests in building or expanding prisons in
their districts are empowered to vote on state financing of urban education
and state school security and penal initiatives necessitated by federal
reforms. Politicians with largely rural and small town bases, who hold considerable sway over the legislatures in states with large prison populations
like Texas, New York, and California, should benefit more politically from
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
89
90
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
expansionist justice policies and exclusionary school policies—which help
keep prisons full—than from generous urban school funding. Even urban
mayors and school superintendents have little incentive to invest in genuine
educational opportunities for unexceptional students trapped in underperforming schools. The post-industrial economy, relatively lucrative illicit
opportunities, and limited social capital foster widespread inability and
reluctance to take full advantage of these opportunities (Noguera, 2003).
Political-economic transformations have resituated inner-city schools (and
‘lockdown’ environments therein) structurally alongside the aggressive
policing and imprisonment of disadvantaged blacks and Latinos as a means
to control and warehouse ‘disposable’ youth (Wacquant, 2001; Giroux,
2003; Nolan and Anyon, 2004).
Predictably, then, the criminal justice boom diverted public funds that
could have been directed at public education (Western et al., 2003;
Jacobson, 2005).9 As criminal justice budgets have skyrocketed, lawsuits in
more than 40 states have alleged that inequitable state financing of poor
school districts is responsible for conditions in poor schools that run afoul
of the states’ own constitutions (New York Times, 2003). Extreme fiscal
restraints coupled with pressure to lift sagging student performance and
reduce school crime, leave school actors with a shrinking pool of ameliorative options. Part of the appeal of school accountability reforms, under
which state and federal school disciplinary mandates can be subsumed, is
that they are relatively inexpensive to implement. Forced inter-school competition, ‘high-stakes’ testing, and the removal of dangerous and disruptive
students are cheap alternatives to renovating and modernizing schools and
hiring more qualified teachers and counselors.
As mentioned, however, centralized mandates set only general parameters for district-level policy. They lack the necessary specificity, therefore, to
explain convergent criminalization patterns such as increases in metal
detectors, drug sweeps, and court referrals from schools. The diffusion of
concordant practices across subsets of schools (e.g. inner-city) is rooted not
only in state coercion and incentives and in similar triggering factors (e.g.
overcrowded facilities and disengaged students) but, more fundamentally,
in school organizations’ shared quest for professional and political credibility. For schools to effectively interrelate across institutional domains—
with government, employers, families, and the media—they must affirm
society’s prevailing ideas and values, including the new ‘political accord’
(Gintis and Bowles, 1988) that has been reached on youth crime and punishment. One way that schools can openly endorse aspects of this accord
such as incorrigibility, high rates of juvenile crime, the threat of youthful
‘predators’, and the necessity of expanded punishment and control
(Garland, 2001; Giroux, 2003), is through the ‘transportation of political
practices’ from the penal realm into the school (Gintis and Bowles, 1988).
The similarity of particular techniques, symbols, and rationales that schools
borrow from the penal realm is also rooted in the shared pursuit of credibility.
Schools can minimize political risks and maintain effective inter-institutional
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
communication by adopting ‘best practices’ and relying on the advice of recognized school security professionals (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983). School
security consultants are often rooted ideologically and professionally in the
wider criminal justice profession (Trump and Lavarello, 2001) and have
helped situate school misconduct within the purview of criminal justice
(Simon, 2006). The independent contribution of criminal justice professionals
to school penal trends is explored more fully later.
The ‘subjective’ influence of social structure on school
criminalization
Structural factors shape school penal trends, not merely through shifting the
strategic calculus of lawmakers and policy makers, but also through exerting direct influence on individual actors operating at the levels of the school
and the classroom. Most scholars who explore the relationship between
structural realities, like social class hierarchies and individual subjectivities,
follow in the path of Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Passeron describe how
the parallel lines of social thought and actions entailed in group membership
instill in group members a shared habitus or ‘system of internalized structures, schemes of perceptions, conception, and action’ (1977: 86).
The criminalization response, whether a teacher’s decision to summon
security guards to a minor classroom disturbance or a principal’s pursuit of
the arrest or removal of that student, is mediated by individual interpretations of social reality. While sociologists differ widely in how much autonomy they permit individuals in developing their own interpretations and
acting upon them, few disagree that structural forces condition and constrain their thoughts and actions.
Two interrelated aspects of the habitus with profound implications for
classroom and school disciplinary climate are perceptions of students’
future prospects and the negotiated balance of power between teachers and
students. While perceptions of the opportunity structure are an important
mechanism linking social structure with student aspirations and effort
(MacLeod, 1987), they also are an important component of the habitus of
school staff, which should condition how these actors respond to errant students. Educators consciously and unconsciously aim to prepare youth to
assume their rightful position in the social strata and hierarchical workplace (Bowles and Gintis, 1976; Katznelson and Weir, 1985; Ferguson,
2000). Accordingly, much school activity is organized around the tasks of
classification and socialization. Even school punishment, which is generally
depicted as a response to past and present behavior, also acts prospectively
by sorting future ‘dropouts’ (Bowditch, 1993) and socializing students
(Durkheim, 1973; Foucault, 1977). If schools’ penal and surveillance practices are tools of classification and socialization, it follows that teachers’
perceived changes in the occupational structure onto which these devices
are mapped should prompt corresponding changes in these practices.10
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
91
92
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
This argument finds support in evidence suggesting that criminalization
practices reflect increased perceptions of troublesome students as future
criminals or prisoners. The needs of such students fall outside of the traditional school disciplinary paradigm, which is tied to images of students as
future workers and citizens. Bleak prospects are so noticeable in poor communities and media constructions thereof, that they cannot have escaped
the notice of urban school professionals. For instance, nearly 60 percent of
black male high school dropouts experience imprisonment by age 30–4
(Pettit and Western, 2004).
Of course, many education professionals in distressed schools are dedicated
to diverting as many students as possible from the ‘criminal justice track’. On
the other hand, recent examples abound of teachers and school administrators projecting criminal futures onto their students (Blum and Woodlee,
2001; Nolan and Anyon, 2004). Concordant research in California finds that
many students in impoverished schools believe that educators perceive them
as ‘animals’, ‘inmates’, or ‘killers’ (Fine et al., 2004) and that black males and
females are less than half as likely as their white counterparts to believe that
their teachers support them and care about their success (Noguera, 2003).
Ferguson (2000) offers deeper exploration into how objective penal realities are internalized by school staff and assimilated into the school disciplinary process, even for students as young as fifth and sixth graders.
Through her inquiry into why African-American youth were disproportionately banished to the school’s ‘punishing room’ and ‘jailhouse’, she discovered that young African-American children facing discipline, unlike
white children, are written and cast into roles imagined for adults in the
world outside the school. Owing to a dominant image of black males as
criminals and prisoners, many school authorities view chronically disobedient black boys as ‘bound for jail’ and ‘unsalvageable’.
Implicit in the designation of black students as unsalvageable is the recognition of two emergent structural realities discussed earlier: (1) that prison,
which reifies criminality and tends to foreclose a productive future, looms
over the future of African-American youth who fail in school; and (2) that
schools lack the resources to reverse the downward trajectories of the most
troublesome students without compromising the quality of teaching and
services aimed at more deserving or promising students. It is likely that this
dynamic is most conspicuous in the ‘lowest tier’ high schools where labels
like ‘bound for jail’ are often legitimized through justice system interactions
both inside and outside the school (Devine, 1996).
The anticipatory labeling of students as future prisoners in need of coercive control or exclusion can be a self-fulfilling prophecy as students frequently suspended from school face increased risks of juvenile and adult
incarceration (Arum and Beattie, 1999; Skiba et al., 2003). Just as the success of a ‘College Prep’ track can be gauged by the share of students in this
track who attend college, the reliability of penal and exclusionary practices
at weeding out those students on the ‘fast track’ to jail may, perversely,
legitimate and reinforce these practices.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
Focusing on perceptions of external opportunity structures is insufficient,
however, since the attitudes and behaviors that confront school staff each
day exert a much more decisive influence on their disciplinary responses.
However, even those who believe that the complex, dynamic rituals of
power and resistance within schools possess their own internal logic and
autonomous sphere of influence (Willis, 1977) acknowledge that disciplinary regimes must assume new forms within a structural landscape of mass
unemployment and incarceration (Willis, 2004). In Learning to Labor,
Willis argues that most working class students cede to teachers’ respect and
obedience in exchange for their ‘equivalents’ in knowledge and credentials.
For students who begin to see school knowledge and credentials as irrelevant, on the other hand, ‘the teachers’ authority becomes increasingly the
random one of the prison guard, not the necessary one of the pedagogue’
(Willis, 1977: 72). Pragmatic teachers often respond by offering freedom
and fun instead of knowledge and expect, in return, that disaffected students not hinder the ‘good students’ or otherwise challenge the basic paradigm of power relations in the school. Both sets of terms may be more
difficult to negotiate and maintain, however, with discontented students
forcibly concentrated in today’s inner-city schools. First, such an exchange
system garners little faith from either teachers or students when unemployment and incarceration are objectively more plausible than college.
Teachers are often bereft of not only sufficient resources but also a cogent
narrative of opportunity that can help them gain voluntary compliance
from students and couch their role in non-repressive terms. The second
option of ceding more control to the disaffected students, while not uncommon, is also less viable where teachers are called to account for lax performance and behavioral standards. In this light, it is understandable that
teachers and administrators often perceive little choice but to summon
repressive means to swiftly remove disruptive students from the classroom
and the school. Criminal justice offers a useful template and accessible tools
for this purpose (Simon, 2006).
The independent role of justice system agents
Teachers and other education professionals are not the only agents whose
interests and subjectivities should figure prominently in a theory of school
disciplinary transformation. It is also important to understand the role of
security and criminal justice agents. As mentioned earlier, criminal justice
professionals have assumed an enlarged role in the school disciplinary
process, often usurping traditional responsibilities of teachers. The emergence of crime as a central pathway for governance (Arum, 2003 Simon,
2006) and the willingness of overwhelmed and fearful school actors to summon and to cede disciplinary authority to justice system agents help explain
this trend. However, these explanations largely treat justice system actors
as objects of reform rather than as agents of it.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
93
94
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
While a passive characterization of justice system actors was appropriate
when criminal justice fields were smaller and less professionalized, it is less
tenable today. Criminal justice professionals, thanks to the vast expansion of
the criminal justice system, are highly organized. Through professional associations, they seek to maintain or enhance their legitimacy, prestige, and working conditions (DiMaggio and Powell, 1983; Beckett, 1997; Simon, 2006).
Once justice system actors implicated in school criminalization are conceptualized as professional and political interest groups, one is compelled to
ask how the flow of criminal justice personnel, technology, and expertise
into schools serves these groups’ interests and what role these groups play
in school criminalization (Becker, 1984). For example, installing police to
find and fight crime in schools can bring collective benefits to the policing
profession by creating more jobs and funding opportunities, and, with the
help of educational components like DARE, by promoting their image as a
vital and benevolent institution.11
Similar explanations have been offered for the increased role of the juvenile court within the school disciplinary process. While many overburdened
juvenile court judges resent the addition of school misconduct cases to their
dockets (Rimer, 2004), others may welcome this change. Expanded procedural protections and moral panics about juvenile crime since the 1960s
jointly led to the criminalization of juvenile courts (Feld, 1999). In the
process, juvenile courts lost jurisdiction over tens of thousands of youth to
criminal courts. Even more importantly, the increasingly adversarial and
punitive thrust of juvenile justice reform threatens the professional status
and survival of the large contingent of juvenile court professionals who
retain a rehabilitative orientation (Leiber et al., 2002). Expanding the juvenile court’s jurisdiction over schools, which includes other popular initiatives like school-based probation, at once helps keep court dockets full
(Becker, 1984; Schwartz and Rieser, 2001) and reclaims for the court a
rehabilitative role within a marked rehabilitative space—the School
(Muncie and Hughes, 2002).
While the involvement of police and juvenile courts in the regulation of
student behavior obviously signals schools’ incorporation of a crime control paradigm, it bears repeating that security guards, police, and judges,
like students and teachers, are subjective actors, prone to accept, but
capable of resisting, the imperatives of criminalization. For instance,
Devine (1996) notes that school officers in the lowest tier schools of NYC
build mentoring relationships with students. Likewise, a training model
for school police officers developed by the Vera Institute of Justice that
teaches adolescent development and positive reinforcement has been
incorporated into the NYPD’s training of ‘all new school safety agents’.12
The importation of criminal justice into schools thus involves a process of
mutual accommodation. Whether some progressive schools are capable of
co-opting criminal justice tools and agents to the extent that they no
longer qualify as agents of criminalization is an open theoretical and
empirical question.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
Conclusion
The importation of symbols, tactics, and personnel from the realm of criminal justice into schools is neither an inevitable and universal trend nor an accident of social history. Schools, like all institutions, are sites of dynamic social
interaction wherein functions are continuously negotiated, structural constraints subjectively interpreted, proper responses hotly contested and inconsistently implemented—and the results of this cacophony of conflicting forces
never completely certain. Even in the most distressed urban schools, progressive visions of education—rooted in the values of liberty, equality, tolerance,
citizenship, and personal growth—actively compete with penological imperatives in shaping personal and institutional agendas (Gintis and Bowles,
1988; Fine et al., 2004). The extent to which students confront school environments that weigh penological imperatives and images more heavily than
pedagogical ones is an empirical question that deserves more systematic attention. That said, sufficient evidence supports a provisional thesis of an overarching criminalization of school discipline, especially within urban schools.
At the same time, the criminalization of school discipline, however prevalent, should not be subsumed under a singular social project or process,
whether it is the USA’s moral panics about youth and school violence,
school accountability reforms, the automation of school disciplinary procedures, or the ascendancy of crime as a narrative for governance. Rather, the
present-day, multidimensional penal realities in the USA’s schools are fully
understandable only through tracing their multiple historical and social
underpinnings (Garland, 2001). The increasingly bleak employment and
imprisonment prospects of inner-city students and teachers’ and administrators’ perceptions of these realities should figure prominently in efforts to
theorize criminalization in the school context and in strategies to reverse it.
Notes
I thank the following people for helping guide this article’s development:
James Ainsworth-Darnell, Ira Cohen, Stephanie De Luca, Joseph
Hirschfield, Monique Payne, Becky Pettit, Paul Reck, Pat Roos, Helene
White, and three anonymous reviewers. Any and all errors and misconceptions are mine.
1. Personal interview with the author in May 2002.
2. The Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights estimates that from
1974 to 1997 the rate of suspensions increased steadily from 3.7 percent
of all students to 6.8 percent (Brooks et al., 1999). As states implemented
zero tolerance policies during the 1990s, the number of expulsions
mounted (Fuentes, 2003). In Chicago, officially recorded expulsions
increased from 14 in 1992–3—before zero tolerance was enacted—to 737
in 1998–9 (Civil Rights Project, 2000).
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
95
96
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
3. It is true that virtually all the major stakeholders in education policy at the
national level endorse alternative education programs for banished students
(Boylan and Weiser, 2002). However, those who operate, staff, and fund
such segregated school environments may come to define their purpose as the
isolation and control (or even punishment) of a criminal population. Nolan
and Anyon refer to urban forms of these settings as ‘new intermediary
institutions that manage the stages between school and prison’ (2004: 142).
4. During the 1999–2000 school year, African-American students comprised
17 percent of San Diego’s students and 50 percent of those suspended for
‘disruption’ or ‘defiance’ (Applied Research Center, 2002).
5. Thanks largely to federal funding begun under the COPS program, urban,
rural, and suburban schools all vastly expanded the number of school
resource officers. By 1997, public schools hosted 9400 school resource
officers (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000). Their number mushroomed to
14,337 by 2003 (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2006).
6. Even the West Paducah, KY high school that experienced one of the ‘rampage’ shootings of the 1990s has greeted criminalization with ambivalence. According to the school’s principal, the main goal of the school’s
SRO is to be a ‘positive role model’ and ‘build trusting relationships with
students’ (Pascopella, 2005). Likewise, the morning ritual in which teachers search book bags and pat down students is couched in a way that
rejects the rhetoric of coercion and criminalization in favor of a consumerist discourse. The school principal asserts, ‘We’ve tried to make it a
Wal-mart greeter situation rather than, “I’m searching your book bag.”
We try to make it a positive experience’ (Pascopella, 2005).
7. Many inner-city schools, in their zealous pursuit of performance standards,
have adopted rigid drill-based instruction and ‘proto-military’ methods of
classroom discipline (Duncan, 2000; Kozol, 2005). One may surmise that
the importation of criminal justice tools and personnel helps to sustain this
‘pedagogy of direct command and absolute control’ (Kozol, 2005: 64).
8. Becoming a ‘prison town’ can sometimes be a mixed economic and social
blessing (Huling, 2002).
9. Empirical research supports an inverse relationship between prison funding
and school funding. For instance, Johnson (1996), in his study of ‘transcarceration’ across social control institutions in the USA, finds that states’
prison admission rates negatively predicted states’ high school population
rates, and that they were the only significant predictor in multivariate models.
10. This interpretation of classification and socialization practices should not
be confused with the correspondence principle, which posits a functional
correspondence between the needs of the social structure, labor market, or
corporate elite and the practices of schools and teachers (Bowles and
Gintis, 1976). The correspondence thesis has been challenged by work
showing that teachers’ perceptions of the labor market are fuzzy, misguided, and contested, and that schools’ sorting and preparatory practices
often fail to produce their intended results (Weis, 1990). With respect
to explaining criminalization, however, it is not important whether these
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
perceptions perfectly mirror objective conditions of the labor market or
are actualized in student outcomes. It is important only that they shift substantially and correspondingly in response to structural changes and that
they influence disciplinary practices.
11. The criminalization of schools evolves new forms as terrorism becomes the
major axis for new public safety initiatives. Facing progressive cuts in
federal funding for SROs, the 9000-strong National Association of School
Resource Officers, along with school security consulting firms, have called
for an Education Homeland Security Act to ‘fund school terrorism training, improve security and crisis planning’ (Porteus, 2003).
12. http://www.vera.org/section2/section2_4.asp
References
Applied Research Center (2002) Profiled and Punished: How San Diego
Schools Undermine Latino & African American Student Achievement.
Oakland, CA: Applied Research Center.
Arum, Richard (2003) Judging School Discipline: The Crisis of Moral
Authority. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Arum, Richard and Irenee R. Beattie (1999) ‘High School Experience and the
Risk of Adult Incarceration’, Criminology 37(3): 515–40.
Becker, Howard S. (1984) ‘Moral Entrepreneurs: The Creation and Enforcement
of Deviant Categories’, in Delos Kelly (ed.) Deviant Behavior: A Text-Reader
in the Sociology of Deviance, pp. 21–8. New York: St Martin’s Press.
Beckett, Katherine (1997) Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in
Contemporary American Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Beger, Randall R. (2002) ‘Expansion of Police Power in Public Schools and the
Vanishing Rights of Students’, Social Justice 29(1–2): 119–30.
Bickerstaff, Steve, Sara H. Leon and J. Greg Hudson (1997) ‘Preserving the
Opportunity for Education: Texas’ Alternative Education Programs for
Disruptive Youth’, Journal of Law and Education 26(4): 1–39.
Blum, Justin and Yolanda Woodlee (2001) ‘Tour Was for Youths “Beyond
Control”: Teacher Requested Prison “Experience”’, Washington Post, 31
May, p. B1.
Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean-Claude Passeron (1977) Reproduction in Education,
Society, and Culture. London: Sage Publications.
Bowditch, Christine (1993) ‘Getting Rid of Troublemakers: High School
Disciplinary Procedures and the Production of Dropouts’, Social Problems
40(4): 493–509.
Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis (1976) Schooling in Capitalist America:
Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life. New York:
Basic Books.
Boylan, Ellen M. and Jennifer Weiser (2002) Survey of Key Education
Stakeholders on Zero Tolerance Student Discipline Policies. Newark, NJ:
Education Law Center.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
97
98
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
Brooks, Kim, Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Ziedenberg (1999) School House Hype:
Two Years Later. San Francisco, CA: Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
Brotherton, David C. (1996) ‘The Contradictions of Suppression: Notes from a
Study of Approaches to Gangs in Three Public High Schools’, Urban Review
28(2): 95–117.
Bryk, Anthony, Penny Bender Sebring, David Kerbow, Sharon Rollow and John
Q. Easton (1998) Charting Chicago School Reform: Democratic Localism as
a Lever for Social Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Bureau of Justice Statistics (2000) Local Police Departments 1997.
Washington, DC: Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice.
Bureau of Justice Statistics (2006) Local Police Departments 2003.
Washington, DC: Office of Justice Programs, US Department of Justice.
Burns, Ronald and Charles Crawford (1999) ‘School Shootings, the Media, and
Public Fear: Ingredients for a Moral Panic’, Crime, Law and Social Change
32(2): 147–68.
Cantor, David, Scott Crosse, Carol A. Hagen, Michael J. Mason, Amy J. Siler
and Adrienne von Glatz (2002) A Closer Look at Drug and Violence
Prevention Efforts in American Schools: Report on the Study on School
Violence and Prevention. Washington, DC: US Department of Education,
Planning and Evaluation Service.
Casella, Ronnie (2003) ‘Security, Schooling, and the Consumer’s Choice to
Segregate’, The Urban Review 35(2): 129–48.
Civil Rights Project (2000) Opportunities Suspended: The Devastating
Consequences of Zero Tolerance and School Discipline Policies.
Washington, DC: Civil Rights Project.
Cohen, Stanley (1972) Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods
and Rockers. London: MacGibbon & Kee.
DeMitchell, Todd A. and Casey D. Cobb (2003) ‘Policy Responses to Violence
in Our Schools: An Exploration of Security as a Fundamental Value’,
Education & Law Journal 2: 459–84.
Devine, John (1996) Maximum Security: The Culture of Violence in Inner-City
Schools. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
DeVoe, Jill F., Katharin Peter, Margaret Noonan, Thomas D. Snyder and
Katrina Baum (2005) Indicators of School Crime and Safety 2005.
Washington, DC: US Departments of Education and Justice.
DiMaggio, Paul J. and Walter Powell (1983) ‘The Iron Cage Revisited:
Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational
Fields’, American Sociological Review 48(2): 147–60.
Duncan, Garrett A. (2000) ‘Urban Pedagogies and the Celling of Adolescents of
Color’, Social Justice 27(3): 29–42.
Durkheim, Emile (1973) Moral Education: A Study in the Theory and
Application of the Sociology of Education. New York: Macmillan.
Feld, Barry C. (1999) Bad Kids: Race and the Transformation of the Juvenile
Court. New York: Oxford.
Ferguson, Ann A. (2000) Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black
Masculinity. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
Fine, Michelle, April Burns, Yasser A. Payne and Maria E. Torre (2004)
‘Civics Lessons: The Color and Class of Betrayal’, Teachers College Record
106(11): 2193–223.
Foucault, Michel (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New
York: Pantheon Books.
Fuentes, Annette (2003) ‘Discipline and Punish: Zero Tolerance Policies Have
Created a “Lockdown Environment” in Schools’, The Nation 277: 17–20.
Garland, David (2001) Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in
Contemporary Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Gintis, Herbert and Samuel Bowles (1988) ‘Contradiction and Reproduction in
Educational Theory’, in M. Cole (ed.) Bowles and Gintis Revisited:
Correspondence and Contradiction in Educational Theory, pp. 16–32.
London: The Falmer Press.
Giroux, Henry A. (2003) ‘Racial Injustice and Disposable Youth in the Age of
Zero Tolerance’, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
16(4): 553–65.
Gottfredson, Gary D., Denise C. Gottfredson, Ellen R. Czeh, David Cantor,
Scott B. Crosse and Irene Hantman (2000) A National Study of Delinquency
Prevention in School: Final Report. Ellicott City, MD: Gottfredson Associates.
Graves, Rachel (2004) ‘Zero Tolerance Raises Alarms: Parents Say Katy ISD
Overdisciplining Students for Minor Offenses’, Houston Chronicle, 18 April,
p. A1.
Hagan, John, Paul J. Hirschfield and Carla Shedd (2002) ‘Shooting at Tilden High:
Causes and Consequences’, in Mark H. Moore, Carol V. Petrie, Anthony A.
Braga and Breanda L. McLaughlin (eds) Deadly Lessons: Understanding Lethal
School Violence, pp. 143–74. Washington, DC: National Research Council.
Huling, Tracy (2002) ‘Building a Prison Economy in Rural America’, in
M. Mauer and M. Chesney-Lind (eds) Invisible Punishment: The Collateral
Consequences of Mass Imprisonment, pp. 197–213. New York: New Press.
Jacobson, Michael (2005) Downsizing Prisons: How to Reduce Crime and End
Mass Incarceration. New York: New York University Press.
Jenness, Valerie (2004) ‘Explaining Criminalization: From Demography and
Status Politics to Globalization and Modernization’, Annual Review of
Sociology 30: 141–71.
Johnson, W. Wesley (1996) ‘Transcarceration and Social Control Policy: The
1980s and Beyond’, Crime and Delinquency 42(1): 114–26.
Katznelson, Ira and Margaret Weir (1985) Schooling for All: Class, Race, and
the Decline of the Democratic Ideal. New York: Basic Books.
Kozol, Jonathan (2005) The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of
Apartheid Schooling in America. New York: Crown.
Kupchik, Aaron and Torin Monahan (2006) ‘The New American School:
Preparation for Post-industrial Discipline’, British Journal of Sociology of
Education 27(5): 617–31.
Leiber, Michael J., Kimberly Schwarze and Kristin Y. Mack (2002) ‘The
Effects of Occupation and Education on Punitive Orientations among
Juvenile Justice Personnel’, Journal of Criminal Justice 30(4): 303–16.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
99
100
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)
MacLeod, Jay (1987) Ain’t No Makin’ It: Leveled Aspirations in a Low-Income
Neighborhood. Colorado: Westview Press.
Muncie, John and Gordon Hughes (2002) ‘Modes of Youth Governance:
Political Rationalities, Criminalization, and Resistance’, in John Muncie,
Gordon Hughes and Eugene McLaughlin (eds) Youth Justice: Critical
Readings, pp. 1–18. London: Sage Publications.
New York Times (2003) Editorial: ‘Fighting for Fairness at School’, New York
Times, 27 June, p. A26.
Noguera, Pedro A. (2003) ‘The Trouble with Black Boys: The Role and
Influence of Environmental and Cultural Factors on the Academic
Performance of African American Males’, Urban Education 38(4): 431–59.
Nolan, Kathleen and Jean Anyon (2004) ‘Learning to Do Time: Willis’ Cultural
Reproduction Model in an Era of Deindustrialization, Globalization, and the
Mass Incarceration of People of Color’, in Nadine Dolby, Greg Dimitriadis
and Paul Willis (eds) Learning to Labor in New Times, pp. 133–49. New
York: Routledge.
Parenti, Christian (2000) Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of
Crisis. London & New York: Verso.
Pascopella, Angela (2005) ‘Money Makes Security Go Around’, District
Administration 41(7): 47–53. Available at http://www.districtadministration.
com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=414
Pettit, Becky and Bruce Western (2004) ‘Mass Imprisonment and the Life
Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration’, American
Sociological Review 69(2): 151–69.
Porteus, Liza (2003) ‘Safety Experts: Schools Are Unprepared for Terror’, Fox
News on-line, 18 September. Available at www.foxnews.com/story/
0,2933,97620,00.html
Public Agenda (2004) Teaching Interrupted: Do Discipline Policies in Today’s
Public Schools Foster the Common Good? New York: Public Agenda.
Reiman, Jeffrey H. (1979) The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison:
Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice. New York: Wiley.
Rimer, Sara (2004) ‘Unruly Students Facing Arrest, Not Detention’, New York
Times, 4 January, p. A1.
Santos, Fernanda (2005) ‘Protest over Metal Detectors Gains Legs: Students
Walk Out’, New York Times, 2 September, p. B1.
Schwartz, Robert and Len Rieser (2001) ‘Zero Tolerance as Mandatory Sentencing’,
in W. Ayers, B. Dohrn and R. Ayers (eds) Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for
Punishment in our Schools, pp. 126–35. New York: The New Press.
Simon, Jonathan (2006) Governing through Crime: How the War on Crime
Transformed American Democracy and Created a Culture of Fear. New
York: Oxford University Press.
Skiba, Russell J., Robert S. Michael, Abra Carroll Nardo and Reece L. Peterson
(2002) ‘The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender
Disproportionality in School Punishment’, The Urban Review 34(4): 317–42.
Skiba, Russell, Ada Simmons, Lori Staudinger, Marcus Rausch, Gayle Dow and
Renae Feggins (2003) ‘Consistent Removal: Contributions of School
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
Hirschfield—Preparing for prison?
Discipline to the School–Prison Pipeline’, paper presented at the School to
Prison Pipeline Conference, Cambridge, MA, May.
Spielman, Fran and Rosalind Rossi (1997) ‘Off-Campus Arrest Could Boot
Kids: Expulsion Policy to Stiffen’, Chicago Sun-Times, 11 March, p. 3.
Staples, William G. (2000) Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in
Postmodern Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Toby, Jackson (1998) ‘Getting Serious about School Discipline’, The Public
Interest 133: 68–84.
Trump, Kenneth S. and Curtis Lavarello (2001) ‘Buyer Beware: What to Look
for When You Hire a School Security Consultant and to Arm or Not to
Arm?’, American School Board Journal 188(3): 30–4.
Wacquant, Loïc (2001) ‘Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and
Mesh’, in D. Garland (ed.) Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and
Consequences, pp. 82–120. London: Sage Publications.
Weis, Lois (1990) Working Class without Work: High-School Students in a
De-industrializing Economy. New York: Routledge.
Western, Bruce and Katherine Beckett (1999) ‘How Unregulated Is the U.S.
Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution’, American
Journal of Sociology 104(4): 1030–60.
Western, Bruce, Vincent Schiraldi and Jason Zeidenberg (2003) Education &
Incarceration. Washington, DC: Justice Policy Institute.
Willis, Paul (1977) Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working
Class Jobs. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
Willis, Paul (2004) ‘Twenty-Five Years On: Old Books, New Times’, in Nadine
Dolby, Greg Dimitriadis and Paul Willis (eds) Learning to Labor in New
Times, pp. 167–96. New York: Routledge.
Wilson, William. J. (1996) When Work Disappears: The World of the New
Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.
PAUL J. HIRSCHFIELD is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology
and in the Program of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, New Brunswick,
New Jersey. His research centers on the causes and consequences of criminalization in relation to school misconduct, mental illness, and youthful marijuana use and minor delinquency. He is currently examining the impact of
spatial hyperconcentrations of police-initiated arrests on social attitudes and
behavior among African-American and Latino school children.
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com by Mariame Kaba on September 3, 2010
101